Jacques Kallis : King Kallis
No batsman prizes his wicket more highly, and no wicket in all of
cricket is more highly prized. Jacques Kallis is the broad-shouldered
colossus of the South African team, a figure whose looming presence
inspires calm in some and dread in others.
Few players who belong to the modern age are a better fit for the notion
of the classical cricketer. Kallis is a fine, forceful batsman who has
at his disposal both a rock-solid technique and a mind impervious to
distraction. Though his role as a bowler diminishes with each passing
season, he will be remembered as a purveyor of sometimes surprising pace
and swing, and awkward bounce. In the slips, his sure-handedness and
rattlesnake reflexes make ridiculous catches look regulation.
Kallis announced himself as a batsman of
international stature in his seventh Test, the drawn Boxing Day epic at
Melbourne in 1997, when he scored a fighting 101 on a worn last-day
pitch. Not even Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne could dislodge him before
he had all but saved the match for South Africa.
Over
the years Kallis has delivered many such innings, performances in which
grit is a far more valuable commodity than glitz to a South African
team that remains more confident in the field and with its fast bowlers
in full cry than as a batting unit. Kallis has willingly shouldered the
role of the fulcrum around which the wheel must try to turn. But,
occasionally, he has unfurled a stroke of startling aggression that
hints at what might have been.
Certainly,
his lofted drive, which begins with a menacing backlift before
uncoiling into the irresistible momentum of a mighty downward swoop of
the bat and finishing in a twirl of Baroque, might be described as
Mozart in motion. In the lightning flash of that fleeting instant it
really does seem as if Kallis could, in the words of one observer, hit a
six whenever he felt like it.
His
critics, particularly those who have a limited understanding of the
dynamics of the South African team, accuse him of not dominating attacks
he has already ground into the dust, of unnecessarily slow scoring, and
of failing to take the match situation into account as he plots his
innings. All of which hints at selfishness, which is quite ironical,
because his team-mates vouch for the fact that Kallis bats the way he
does precisely because he puts his team first and his personal ambitions
some way behind. It's the only way he knows how.
South Africa
